Richard Shotton: 0:00

There are simple tactics that you can apply to get those price rises through with less churn.

Richard Shotton: 0:08

I think, as marketers, it's fascinating, isn't it? And actually I suppose it's common sense. But how many people actually do this, I don't know.

Richard Shotton: 0:16

So the people that hear the expensive tale. They will give you adjectives like I know. It's deep taste, rich and fruity or whatever the other people would tell you. It tastes like dishwater. It's still qualitative, but the key, underlying part is not asking people directly. It's that sense of a little bit of subterfuge, a little bit of obliqueness, to get to the truth.

Chris Norton: 0:42

And the subliminal message in the background about your new book has been there the whole time. I now want to read that one. Welcome back to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps marketers grow their brand through personal stories and a little bit of therapy. I'm your host, chris Norn, and together with my business partner, will Ockenden, we do our best to find you the most interesting guests and stories to help you grow your brand and, hopefully, develop your career. Today we're unlocking the secret source behind the high-impact campaigns with best-selling author and behavioural scientist, richard Shotton.

Chris Norton: 1:17

Richard has written two of the biggest marketing books on the planet the Choice Factory and the Illusion of Choice and he's got a third coming out very soon. He subliminally has it in the background. If you've ever wondered why some tests skyrocket and while others fall flat, or how subtle psychological nudges can supercharge your return on investment at scale, you're in the right place. Over the next 45 minutes to an hour, richard shares the precise growth hacks he used to double response rates, avoid costly cognitive bias traps and design experiments that move fast without sacrificing vigor. Whether you're running seven-figure ad budgets or just getting your first campaign off the ground, after this episode you'll walk away with clear, actionable tactics to apply behavioral science and fuel your next phase of growth.

Chris Norton: 2:04

I think Richard's a great guest. I've been wanting to get him on the show for ages. You are going to love this episode because it is packed full of little tips and biases and things that you can use in your everyday marketing. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's look at how we can become better behavioural scientists and marketers. Enjoy, richard Shotton. Welcome to the show.

Richard Shotton: 2:30

Very nice to see you, very nice to see you both.

Chris Norton: 2:38

So Will and I are delighted to have you on. We've had Phil Agnew on before talking about behavioural science from Nudge and we got very, very excited because it's not our area of expertise but we do use behavioral science subliminally and ways that we don't know all the time. But for our listeners, if you, if you've never heard of behavioral science but you work in marketing which is a strange situation can you explain what it is and how you go about using it?

Richard Shotton: 3:01

so behavioral science is probably what we used to know as psychology, so it's the study of what actually influences people rather than what they claim influences them, and those two things are often often quite different. So I would argue, if you are in marketing, you're in the business of behavior change. You know we're trying to get people to buy more products, pay a premium, switch from a competitor brand, and the fundamentals of marketing are all about behavior change. So this is a peer-reviewed, evidence-based field that looks into well what effectively changes behavior.

Richard Shotton: 3:37

So it's super relevant for any marketer and I think is it fair to say, um, there's a perception that it it's it complicated. Perhaps People might not even think it's. You know, people might think they need a psychology doctorate before they can actually deploy some of these techniques. But that's really not the case, is it?

Richard Shotton: 4:07

subjects are academic. I mean there is uh, there are thousands of psychologists out there running experiments and they will then put those through rigorous, peer-reviewed um processes to to make sure they're robust, so that the roots are academic. But the underlying points of those who are discovering are are super simple. You know, it could be an idea like social proof. You know, emphasize the popularity of your products and it becomes more popular still. Now the academic paper that proves that argument might often be written in a very jargon fueled, complex way, but the underlying principle can be applied very, very simply by a marketer and at what stage should we be um considering behavioral science?

Richard Shotton: 4:47

then, you know, is this something that just needs to kind of run through everything we do? Should it be at the stage of formulating an idea?

Richard Shotton: 4:55

I. I agree on the latter point that any stage you're trying to influence people, you can use behavioral science. So if you're trying to define a strategy, there's a role. But you go all the way down to the most implementational of areas like maybe how you are wording a website or how you are buying your tv campaign you can still use these principles.

Richard Shotton: 5:17

So, for example you know we touched on social proof there's a study that's not very well known I think it's 2017 by Peterson at the University of Texas, and he runs a really large study 1,000 plus people. They go to a website and there's always something that can't be bought. It's just not there. So they're on an e-commerce website and one item they're trying to buy just isn't there. Now the twist in the experiment is sometimes that item is labeled sold out, other times it's labeled out of stock, other times it's labeled unavailable, and what peterson finds is that irritation with the website is about 15% lower if the product is labeled sold out.

Richard Shotton: 6:03

Now his argument is this is all about social proof. This is a very kind of minor application of social proof. He says look, if you go to a website and it's labeled out of stock, what you're doing as a brand is drawing attention to your ineptitude. You haven't been able to get the goods in the right place at the right time, so people get annoyed. But if you say it's sold out, well, well, now you're drawing attention to the popularity of that item, and if it's popular, it becomes more appealing and more people want it. Now that is a very, very tactical implication, but it's super simple and I think it's an interesting example of behavioral science, because it's a costless intervention that you can apply to your website. You know you have to label your product some way. Why not do it in the way that works with human nature rather than against it?

Chris Norton: 6:51

so even at that very tax glenge, you can be applying some of these ideas yeah, I read you the section on that in your book, which is the illusion of choice. But you also had a really interesting bit for me on pricing as well, like because because, when I've got to be honest, I was a Virgin Media customer for years, 12 years Every six months they used to send me a letter, a formal letter Dear Mr Norton, we're increasing your, we're going to increase your fees again, and it went from I don't know 70 pounds a month or something to 130 pounds a month over six years and I decided to just bin the whole thing off. It went from I don't know, £70 a month or something to £130 a month over six years and I decided to just bin the whole thing off. But your explanation of pricing was really interesting, on how you can increase your pricing.

Richard Shotton: 7:37

Do you want to explain a bit about that? Yeah, so if people haven't ever used any behavioural science ideas but are interested in kind of getting stuck in pricing's a brilliant place to start, because if you've got a reasonably sized website, you could do a few ab tests and within a week know whether these principles work. They don't cost anything to apply but you can have a big impact. So you, you had that example of virgin media sending out a price price letter. Well, you could go through all the different experiments in this area from behavioral scientists and you could think okay, well, we know, as behavioral scientists, there's an idea called present bias, which is that costs or benefits that are going to affect me soon loom large Costs and benefits in the future are much more attenuated than affect us much.

Richard Shotton: 8:26

So the argument there would be you know, something that's going to happen to me today will interest me, something that happens to me in six weeks times. That's someone else's problem. You could take that principle and you could apply it to the letter. You know, if you're the brand you mentioned, sends out the letters four weeks prior. Present buyers would say if you don't want people to be as affected by the price rise, send it out six weeks prior, eight weeks prior, or you could take a principle like the pennies a day effect. So there's a psychologist called gorville at harvard that first run these experiments where he basically showed.

Richard Shotton: 9:00

If you talk to people about a cost being 365 pounds a year, they will be shocked by its scale. If you say it's a pound a day, suddenly they think it's barely anything. You know people will focus on the cash amounts that you discuss. What they don't focus on is the unit of time. So in your example with virgin asking for 70 pounds a month, what would be much better is to say well, we're asking for £70 a month. That's the same as £2.30 a day. If it's a £10 increase, you could say we're increasing it by 30 pence a day. It's not fundamentally changing what they ask for. The behavioral science principles normally around this idea that you can make exactly the same price appear larger or smaller by applying some of these ideas but the section that I liked is that you also said that you can increase your pricing.

Chris Norton: 9:56

If you um, it's better if you increase your pricing if you explain the reasoning behind why your price is going up. So if you just go oh we, we're Virgin Media, we're increasing your prices from £70 a month to £120 a month next week tough Whereas if you go, actually we're increasing it to £120 a month and the reason we're doing that is because of X and Y and Z, and I thought that was really interesting for increasing your prices yeah.

Richard Shotton: 10:57

So what we're talking about here is the principle of essentially fairness, and if you read a kind of standard economics textbook, that would barely ever get mentioned. People would just talk about well, you know people, uh, a customer's going to be looking at how much value they get from a product and then compare it to what you are asking and what benefits they get. But there's an awful lot of studies that suggest fairness is a very important driver of behavior. Um, there's some thought experiments by thaler I think it might even be thaler and kahneman where they say some people look, there's a snowstorm and roads are all blocked. The hardware store go from selling the shovels at £10 a unit to £15. Is this fair? And most people are flabbergasted by it and say no, that's just wrong.

Richard Shotton: 11:50

They then give other people the thought experiment where they change the situation, and it might be. You know, a green grocer was charging 10 pounds for a box of aubergines, but they, their supplier has put up their costs and now they're charging 15. Is this fair? Unfortunately, everyone thinks it's absolutely fine. So the argument from faylor and Kahneman is people have an element of fairness in their mind, that there is a fair price to pay for something. And if you are just price gouging, they will react very poorly. But if you can draw attention to the fact that you're just passing on costs, people will respond very differently. So again, yeah, there is an experiment out there run by academics that has been shown to work in certain situations.

Richard Shotton: 12:54

What you can apply to to get those price rises through with less, less churn um, something I've been fascinated to hear you talk about and also some of these biases are covered in the book is the five guys example, and it's probably because we're approaching lunchtime and I'm thinking about five guys fries. But um, five guys are a great case study, aren't they? In a business that uses a number of cognitive biases to well, arguably it's. You know, the success of the group is down to this approach. Do you want to kind of talk through a few of the examples there, particularly the extra scoop of fries that you get in the bag? Oh, okay.

Richard Shotton: 13:34

Yeah, there's a few little areas there, so the extra scoop of fries in the bag is interesting, and one of the principles I think they're applying there is is the peak end rule. So there's work by daniel kahn, running by the nobel prize in 2002, and then donald rademeyer, and the original work was done with medical operations and what they showed was the, what people remembered about the operation. So in this case the pain level was not the average pain level that was a pretty good poor guy to memory but two moments in particular. So the peak of an experience, this is the single most pleasurable or an operation single most painful moment that loomed large. And then the other part that really shaped long-term memory was the final moments, the experience.

Richard Shotton: 14:24

So in an operation you could have 12 minutes of low pain and then three minutes of medium pain at the very end, and those people remember the situation worse than someone who had 12 minutes of medium pain at the beginning and then three minutes of medium pain at the very end, and those people remember the situation worse than someone who had 12 minutes of medium pain at the beginning and then three minutes of low pain at the end. It's how you end an experience that really sticks in people's minds. Now that idea that they called the peak end rule, you could argue, is being applied by five guys. Very nicely, you are doing one standout thing thing this generous extra scoop of fries, and you're doing it right at the end of the the serve. So that's the thing that sticks in people's minds when they go back into market next. So yeah, five guys.

Richard Shotton: 15:04

I think is a lovely example of a business taking a number of different ideas and applying them across the the product experience and actually that peak end rule, you know, after I read about it I started to think about it and I went to um flat iron with my, with my family, and at the end of a flat iron steak you get like a little, a little steak knife and they tell you you can get free ice cream on the way out. And my kids, that's the bit they remember. They don't remember the steak particularly, but they remember this amazing experience when they got free ice cream, which actually is probably built into the cost of the steak anyway, but it's um, you know, and I think, as as marketers, it's that you know, it's, it's fascinating, isn't it? And actually it's, I suppose it's common sense, but how many people actually do this, I don't know I mean it's interesting, isn't it?

Richard Shotton: 15:52

because you could say common sense would be. Well, people should surely act like rational calculating machines and weigh every moment of an experience equally. I mean that would be. I think, the the common sense argument. But what actually happens is, the end moment of an experience is disproportionately important in shaping memory. So I think it's often only common sense after you've heard about the experiment. Once the experiment's been explained, it then seems obvious. But actually, before knowing about the experiment, you could say oh well, wait a minute. Maybe it's the first moment that's most important, because that sets kind of the experience you know. It shapes people's perceptions. Maybe it's the average experience, maybe it's the end. I think often before people know the results, they come up with all sorts of different ideas. Once they know the results, we use our intelligence and rationality to explain it as if it could have been no, no other thing so how long did it take you to write this book?

Chris Norton: 16:50

and you've got another book coming out called hacking the human mind. How long did it? How long did it take you to write a book?

Richard Shotton: 16:56

uh, the first book was super efficient. So the first book was the choice factory that I had a really strict plan. I was working for an agency at the time so there was a very clear division. There was kind of agency time in my time and I would go to a cafe at the weekend, drop my kids off at swimming and gym, whatever they were doing, and that took me about three hours.

Richard Shotton: 17:18

While they were at those gym sessions I'd sit in the cafe and I'd sketch out a mind map and you know I'd have a little bubble in the middle which would be one bias and all different experiments I was going to talk about in circles around it. I needed to get that done in the three-hour period and then in the evenings that week I wrote the chapter. So I was doing a chapter a week. It probably took about I don't know eight hours a chapter a week. It probably took about eight hours a chapter. So the choice factor was super efficient, probably about 25, 30 days of work done at the evenings and the weekends. But then, when it came to the illusion of choice and having a human mind when I was working for myself, it was much, much harder.

Richard Shotton: 18:00

I procrastinated. Loads Work would come in and then I would stop writing the chapter and I'd get onto a project and then I'd go back to the chapter two weeks later and forgotten what I was talking about so that those two were much, much less uh, efficient. So I've always got a much uh pleasant, more pleasant memory of the choice factor so, um, I think, chris and I have obviously read the illusion of choice.

Richard Shotton: 18:22

I think it's um, I've always wondered, you know, it's always been a discipline I've been interested in, but it's hard to actually find a kind of singular source of practical, practical, actionable advice. And I think the illusion of choice is fantastic because it's 16 and a half lessons, isn't it?

Richard Shotton: 18:39

and there's a reason for it being 16 and a half yeah which I found quite amusing, but yeah, I mean anyone interested in in a kind of an introduction and a practical application of behavioral science. I think is absolutely fascinating. So, um, how can the human mind then what's that kind of cover then? How's that kind of different?

Richard Shotton: 18:56

so uh, it's written with a co-author, so I've written it with michael aaron flicker. And what we've done there is lead with the brand first of all. So every chapter is a brat about a brand. So there's red bull, hargadass, amazon prime. Each one has its own chapter, got 17 brands, little potted history at the beginning of the chapter which explains a bit of the brand history. And then we take two experiments that we say explains part of that brand success and not the entire success.

Richard Shotton: 19:26

Of course I think that'd be a bit too glib, but we look at two principles they have have used to power their success. So I think by starting with a brand, we keep it even more easy, uh, and to read much more accessible. But again, the focus is a simple overview of the existing experiments, new ones that we have done to show that some of these academic ideas work in the real world. And then the most important bit for every chapter, like with the previous two, is well, now you know about these things, what do you do differently? Because I certainly got aggravated there was too much chat about the experiments and not enough about what people do differently, so it's meant to be very practical that's what I love about your book is that you you've actually you look at um, biases or whatever.

Chris Norton: 20:14

You look at the academic research and often they're like, let's be honest, they're quite small pools of human, but then you've gone off and done the actual research yourself with various different people, haven't you?

Richard Shotton: 20:26

Yeah, so certainly, if you go back to, like, the 1950s and 60s, there was an over-reliance on small samples and there was an over-reliance on students. So there's a famous study from 1972 by Ian Begg a study I absolutely love a talk about the illusion of choice where he reads out a list of 22-word phrases. So half of the phrases are what he calls abstract ones, things like subtle fault or basic truth. These are intangible concepts. The other half of the words that he reads out are concrete phrases like white horse or flaming forest tangible things that you can visualize. And what Begg found was that, on average, people remember 9% of the abstractions but 36% of the concrete phrases. So you've got this massive fourfold difference in memorability, which Begg puts down to the power of vision. He says vision is the most powerful of our senses. So if you use language, people can visualize it's super sticky, but if you use language people can't visualize, it's very, very forgettable.

Richard Shotton: 21:32

Now, first you hear about, and think that about, that study. I think this is bloody amazing. This is such a powerful tool for brands to use. You know so many brands talk about being high quality or trustworthy or premium, but that is very abstract and therefore very forgettable. So what you need to do as a brand is translate the concepts you want to communicate into tangible, visualizable words. So an example of that would be red bull gives you wings. That's concrete. From picture a wing. You can picture something flying. Well, they could so easily have done is say red bull gives you wings that's concrete from picture a wing, you can picture someone flying. What they could so easily have done is say red bull gives you energy, but that would have been abstract and non-visualizable. So you've got this super study with really practical implications. But then, as you go through the original paper, you realize is this kind of the experiment on 24 students? You think, well, wait a minute 24 people.

Richard Shotton: 22:21

This is ridiculous so I re-ran that study with mike trahan back in I think it's 2021, maybe 2022 and we did a sample of 450 plus. We changed all the words. They were much more commercial. I'd rather not ask about muscular gentlemen and white horses. We were asking about things like fast cars and skinny jeans. And, crucially, we did a little change, which was to put a gap between people seeing the words and then being asked what they could remember.

Richard Shotton: 22:54

And not only when we got the results did it replicate Begg's findings. We found an even more extreme finding. So we found that people were 10 times more likely between 9 and 10, times more likely to remember the concrete over the abstract. So you're absolutely right, many of the original studies were done on small samples. But rather than just dismissing them, what I think people should do is either rerun them in their own settings or find out if more modern behavioral scientists and psychologists have already done that job. Because if you, if a study was, you know, interesting and powerful and done back in the 1950s, there's 75 years for psychologists to replicate the study and see if it works on a more representative audience on a larger scale I've got a question here, so I was going to ask what is the single most powerful behavioral principle that marketers overlook when they want to scale a campaign?

Chris Norton: 23:55

so what? What is the one that they're missing? Like people out there will said earlier that we think of it as quite academic and complicated. So if you're a marketer, what is the one? Because social proof's the one we all. A lot of people know, isn't it? But your book 60 has got 16 and a half in this one. I hope it's got 17 and three quarters in the other one unfortunately, they're only 17 um, but they're not.

Richard Shotton: 24:18

They're not 25, I realized that mistake.

Richard Shotton: 24:20

On the first one, um, so social. I think you're right with social proof. That's a massively important principle. Um, often if you look at comparative studies between the biases, uh, it comes out towards the top if people try and rank the impact. But I think if you were going to go for one thing, I would probably go for the principle of making it easy. So, interestingly, last 25 years, there have been two economists who've won the Nobel Prize for Economics. They've got a kind of behavioral science interest or background. So you've got Daniel Kahneman, who was actually a psychologist. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, and Richard Thaler won it in 2017.

Richard Shotton: 25:00

And both of those people, when they are asked about the single biggest lesson from all their experiments, both of them say the same thing. Both of them say make it easy. Now, when they make that argument, they are not just stating um, you know an obvious truth. They're not just saying if you want to encourage behavior, make it easier and it will have a little boost. That would be, you know, we all know that what they're saying slightly different. They are arguing that removing small bits of friction tends to have an outsized effect. So it's not just that, it makes a more likely to happen. It has a bigger than expected effect.

Richard Shotton: 25:40

They argue that marketers and people interested behaviors change. They tend to underestimate the importance of removing friction and they tend and they tend to overestimate the importance of boosting appeal. So it's not the most exciting of principles. I think the one that actually more people should use is the principle of make it easy. If you are trying to change behavior, before you think about how do I motivate someone to change, the thing you should really start with is how do I make it easier for that person to change, and that is not just semantics, you know, flipping on his head and thinking what is stopping someone changing behavior? It leads to a very different set of interventions than thinking how to encourage someone to change their behavior. So marketers just need to go through yeah, um.

Richard Shotton: 26:28

I mean, I think the example you gave amazon one click ordering. You know that's the ultimate in frictionless um. E-commerce is same day delivery, yeah, um. And what I found fascinating is the the flip of that which we talk about in the book, which is is actually adding friction. So, for example, a public health campaign you know when you want to stop behaviours you talk about adding friction can actually be beneficial in some respects as well, can't it?

Richard Shotton: 26:54

Absolutely. So you say often it's just from this phrase make it easy. But that is with the assumption of, yes, you want to encourage a behaviour, but actually absolutely if you want to put someone off a behaviour, the flip is true make it harder. So the example I talk about in the book is I think it's Keith Horton at Oxford. He's interested in stopping suicide. So what can you do to stop suicide? And he looks at first of all all britain where there was a law change around, I think either late 90s, early 2000s, where prior to that you could go to a corner store and buy a giant tub of paracetamol 64 in there. You peel off the top and just if you wanted to take that whole tub in your mouth in in five, ten seconds.

Richard Shotton: 27:44

Law changes so now there is a restriction from then on of the size of the packet you can buy. So I think if you go to a corner store now the maximum you can buy is 16 paracetamol tablets in one packet. It might be more like 24 in a pharmacy and they're in a blister pack. Now that adds in a little bit of friction to a suicide overdose via paracetamol. You now would have to go to multiple stores to buy the paracetamol and you'd have to spend five minutes popping all those pills out, even though that seems like a very small barrier, very small bit of friction in the context of such an important decision.

Richard Shotton: 28:22

What horton shows is that when that regulation came in, we had a situation in Britain where previously suicides by paracetamol was increasing. Once the regulation comes, you see this turn and that it starts to drop. By his estimate, I think over 15 years, maybe it's something like 400, maybe nearly 500 deaths have not happened because of that regulation change and you see the same pattern across Europe when the regulations have gone in. So yeah, an example in a very, very extreme setting, even in something as important as suicide, thinking first about how do we add friction in rather than how do we change those motivations, can be a very, very effective solution another one might be the smoking ban.

Chris Norton: 29:07

I suppose you can't, you couldn't smoke in pubs, and making that harder to do that and adding friction to that might be another one, because that that's that seems to have worked. I can't remember when the smoking ban was brought in it must be and removing them in pubs and stopping these to sell packs of 16 in pubs, didn't they slightly cheaper?

Richard Shotton: 29:22

and packs of 10? So there's a number of kind of hoops to jump through before you can then buy cigarettes, isn't there?

Richard Shotton: 29:30

absolutely so. That's the great thing about these experiments. Often the experiment tells you an insight about human nature. That's a a powerful thing. But then how you apply that well, the world's your oyster. The only thing that stops you is your imagination and creativity. You can take the same principle and apply it in anti-smoking campaigns, anti-suicide campaigns, you, but you can apply it in I don't know, soft drink sales or getting people to watch more netflix. And the same principle can be applied in so many ways. And that that's the great thing about these experiments. Whatever categories one works in, whatever sub-discipline in marketing, there's going to be lots of studies out there that can help.

Richard Shotton: 30:12

Now this may seem like a strange question, and I know this doesn't apply to public health campaigns. Are there ethical considerations at play? I mean, is this if I'm taking an extreme view, you know, psychological manipulation?

Richard Shotton: 30:27

so I I would often use a, an analogy, I think, which is think about something like rhetoric. So, you know, there is a study going back to the ancient greeks about how you make more effective speeches or presentations. No one would say, oh, rhetoric is unethical. What they would say is it kind of depends on what you use that rhetoric for. Like you know, martin Luther King used rhetoric to make people love each other and accept us all as equals, whereas you know, you've got a succession of miscellanies and hitlers have used rhetoric to get people to hate each other. It's not the rhetoric that has an ethical position, that's just a neutral tool. It's the end to which you put it when ethics, I think, comes in. So, um, I would always argue behavioral science is neither good nor bad. It's what you use it for, and if you are using it to get kids to start smoking, there's an ethical problem. If you're using it to stop people smoking, then there's, I think, an ethical reason why you you should be, should be doing it, that there's also a bit of an argument of it's very hard not to do it, like you, you said, is this psychological manipulation. I mean the, literally the phrase you used, tried to position it in a negative way. You didn't say is this something that could be or maybe isn't unethical?

Richard Shotton: 31:56

And there's literally experiments that show the language you use will change people's perceptions. There's a study by Loftus and Palmer back in 1974 where they show people a clip of a car accident. So let's say there's a white car and a black car and they're driving to each other. Some people are asked how fast do you think those cars are going when they smash together? And the average answer is 40 miles an hour. Other people are asked how fast do you think those cars were going when they collided? And the average answer is 40 miles an hour. Other people are asked how fast do you think those cars were going when they collided? And the average answer is, I think, 30 or 31 miles an hour. You've got this almost 30% swing in estimates of speed based on the language that's used.

Richard Shotton: 32:34

So Loftus and Palmer said look, we don't interpret reality neutrally. We interpret what we see or what we hear through a lens of the language that's used. And if you use a word like smashed, people thinks the same footage is showing cars going faster than if you use the words like collided. Now that becomes interesting because what it shows is there is no neutral position. You have to use words, you have to use language to describe a situation. What we know from behavioral science is which words you choose will change people's impact. So, yes, it does influence people, but there's no way of not using these principles. You know you had to ask that question in a certain way, but by using the word manipulation it would steer people to thinking it was you've made me ashamed of asking a leading question now no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.

Richard Shotton: 33:24

No, no, no no no, not at all, and um, but it's an interesting point and, I think, an example of yeah, yeah, I think the nhs um a few years ago stopped referring to road traffic accidents and referred to them as road traffic incidents in their kind of terminology and that's a similar thing. It's kind of um removing, I suppose, um prejudice or or avoiding the need to kind of lead people because accident implies obviously somebody's at fault.

Richard Shotton: 33:51

Um, oh, I thought that's that's a very interesting one, because I would have said accident makes it sound like you couldn't do much about it. It was, um, you know, it's just something that happens. Incident, I think makes it sound more controllable.

Richard Shotton: 34:04

So, that's again interesting in that what behavioral science is very clear on is the words that you use will have an effect. Now I would speculate accident might create a sense of fatalism, but you took it very differently. So what it doesn't show from the evidence that I know about is which of us would be right what we now need to do is run a simple experiment to get to that, that truth. So I think, yeah, that's, that's a lovely example I tell you one of the.

Chris Norton: 34:36

I've got some notes on my phone here because I from the book. I was just like taking notes of some of the key things that really interested me. The halo effect was one of the ones that I really liked and I know we'll like this, which is basically because, um, working in as we're working in public relations and being wordsmiths, we've all we're supposed to never, ever make spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes, but it does occasionally happen and you the the halo effect example you've got in the book just made me think, oh my god, it really does have a bad effect, and do you?

Richard Shotton: 35:06

want to explain the halo effect so the original studies were done back in the 1930s by I think it was edward thorndyke, and it's about the idea that when we are making a judgment about a person, what we probably logically should do is weigh up each of their merits independently and come to a decision about them. But what Thorndike argues is we are always looking for shortcuts as people, and so when we are weighing up our thoughts about a person, what we tend to do is just notice one standout characteristic and use that as a guide for all their other attributes. So if someone is particularly charismatic or good looking, we'll assume that they are more honest and they're more intelligent and they're more likable. We take one attribute and we use it as a guide to all their others, even if those other attributes are in reality unrelated. So that's the theory.

Richard Shotton: 36:05

One of the clearest studies into it was a late 70s study by Richard Nismith. So he gets a colleague of his, a Belgian lecturer who's in America, to give a presentation, and he gets his colleague to record two versions. So on one occasion the professor the belgian professor comes across as very likable and warm and friendly. On other occasions he comes across as unfriendly and cranky. But everything else is the same. So same content, same argument, same logic, same facts. Nisbet then recruits group people and shows that group one of the two videos and he then questions all the viewers about what they thought of the lecturer. And, just as you'd expect, the people who see the woman friendly lecturer, they rate him, as you know, kind and friendly and likable. But what's strange is when nisbet continues the questioning and asks about completely unrelated attributes, like the lecturer's looks or his mannerisms or his accent, what he finds is that the group who saw the woman friendly lecturer they rate him as better looking, more nice accent, than the group who saw him behaving in an unfriendly way. So this was Nisbet's argument that we latch onto one aspect of a person and then we use that as a shortcut to all their other characteristics. So that, I think, is fascinating.

Richard Shotton: 37:42

If you are a brand Because, let's say, you want to be trusted, well, a logical approach would be to think well, let's make claims about our trustworthiness, let's um, you know, focus our messaging around that aspect. But what the halo effect would say? Well, maybe there's another way. Maybe you should be funny or you should be likable, because if you increase that metric, all the others will follow. So what you should pick as the, what you should use as a guide to decide what you communicate, is not whether it reflects your strategy and your aims. It's whether it is easier to communicate effectively.

Richard Shotton: 38:26

And that's why I chose the example of humor, because in an ad you can be humorous. You don't have to claim humor. You can tell a joke, but it's very hard to actually be trustworthy in an ad, and what convinces people far more is actual demonstrations rather than claims attributes. So I think the halo effect is is a really fascinating study that I think could get talked about far more, because it opens up the opportunity to get into your communications goals far more obliquely than many people might might assume I think what I've taken from that is, if you're just funny, people think you're better looking.

Chris Norton: 39:04

I think, uh, that's what I was taking from that um, your stuff, then I'm fucked't you.

Richard Shotton: 39:09

Yeah, I'm fucked. Yeah, should we be measuring this stuff? I mean, I think you know it might be seen as a soft discipline, behavioural science. You know, clearly it isn't and clearly it's got tangible benefits. But you know, should marketers be kind of A-B testing this stuff?

Chris Norton: 39:26

you know, or indeed does that happen.

Richard Shotton: 39:29

All the time happen, shouldn't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely so I would. I would say the great thing about this study is you never have to take anyone on faith alone. You know, if you read about a study, don't just unthinkingly apply it to comms. Absolutely put it to the test because, yes, the academics have already shown it works in certain contexts. But maybe you know, let's say, a pennies a day effect, for example, I talked about earlier. You know, talk about a pound a day costs, not 365 pounds a year.

Richard Shotton: 39:57

The original gorville study was on charities. So you might think, well, wait a minute, I don't work in the charity world, I work for a mobile phone company or a insurance provider, and you might think, well, a charity is just too big a leap to my brand. So what you could do is take the methodology that uh is in the public domain, that goreville used, and apply it to your comms so you could send out, like I don't know, five million bits of direct mail or a hundred thousand or two thousand bits of direct mail. Uh, let's say it's two thousand. A thousand of them. Describe your prices as you know. Two pounds a day, that's the same as seven hundred and uh, whatever, that would be seven hundred and thirty pounds a year. Or you could have the other half of the dm just saying it's seven hundred thirty pounds a year for the for the quote, and then you could test which of those got the better sales rate. I think you're absolutely right. All of these ideas should be put to the test.

Chris Norton: 40:58

It does feel like you could keep going forever there, because then you could frame your pricing. We were going to increase prices by £1,200, but we've reduced them, uh, by 300 pounds. So it's only a 900 pound increase, which is only the equivalent to a nescafe gold blend a day, or you know. You could keep going like that forever, couldn't you?

Richard Shotton: 41:20

yeah, and and I guess that's where it moves, from bringing a science to an art that each principle has a power of itself, and sometimes they can be multiplicative. You can start adding them on and get a bigger impact. But of course, if the communications become, you know, war and peace, or complex or confusing, then you'll start to see a tail off. So I think, once it comes to the specific blend, there there's there's an element of art to it, knowing how far to push things. And then, secondly, it brings you back to that need to make sure you're testing constantly.

Chris Norton: 42:00

We need to ask you about your mistake, richard. So our podcast is a bit of therapy for marketing people out there, so it's quite informal, but we've had everything from people who've made little mistakes. I've shared mine, where I sent a press release out that shouldn't have gone out and got national exposure everywhere. So, too, we've had all sorts of things, like somebody who set up a pet store and named it really complicated and nobody knew how to spell it or find it and it was so it didn't do very well. Um, we've had we've had all kinds of different um mistakes. Obviously you do a lot of testing, so I would imagine you make less mistakes in the world of behavioral science, don't you in your day job well, if you're, if you're just testing things you know are going to work for certain, I would argue you're not testing enough.

Richard Shotton: 42:51

You want to be testing things that it might not work. It'd be. I think it'd be definitely a mistake if you didn't do that, because I would always argue that the odds are massively stacked in your favor, because if, as a brand, you test something, it doesn't work well, you turn it off after a week. Downside is very capped. If you test something and it works, you run it forever, so that there's a real imbalance. You know loss is a minimal, upside is is infinite. So I think you are testing too little. If everything's working, you'll be testing the most well-known basic principles and you want to be testing some of the um, either lateral interpretations, those principles or maybe some of the lesser known ideas as well so what have you had?

Richard Shotton: 43:39

something that's gone spectacularly wrong in in marketing um I well, I mean, if it's a personal mistake, I mean, I think the worst thing I ever did and this is showing my age.

Richard Shotton: 43:51

I don't think this even happens any longer. I remember when I just started in marketing I said I'd been about 22, and the key client was Coca-Cola and we were going on a site tour with them to look at all the posters to make sure they're up properly and look nice and in good positions. And I can remember going out the night before and getting so drunk I woke up like at midday the next day and I was meant to have met the client at nine o'clock. So I think, as things go wrong, I think that was the probably the moment where I was most in danger of being fired by the agency I worked with. But luckily my boss took a reasonably relaxed attitude and they kind of met me on, I don't know, the a127 or something pulled over in the label. I picked me up and, uh, I just looked green in the back. Uh, I think I was more a figure of amusement for that's the second.

Richard Shotton: 44:44

Um, that's the second similar mistake and we've had.

Chris Norton: 44:46

We had one a few weeks ago, didn't we we along those lines? Yeah, he went out to an awards and they unexpectedly won an awards and he got absolutely leathered at the awards. You know Jager bombs, here we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forgot he had a pitch at 9am the next morning, oh my God. And then had to go and pitch and lead the pitch Totally hung over. He won it though, I think, didn't he? Yeah, he can't remember what any of the pitch.

Richard Shotton: 45:15

Maybe that was the uh the peak and he can't remember any of it, but they won it. So, yeah, higher expectations of it, yeah, um, bringing it back to behavioral science, and so you've. I mean, I think I think I know the answer to this, but you know what? What mistake do brands usually make? Because there'll be people listening to this thinking you know, I intuitively do this, but I want to do more of this and I want to be ab testing everything. Blah, blah, blah. What you know is this is a common pitfall brands fall into absolutely so.

Richard Shotton: 45:38

I think the most common pitfall is people hear about some of these experiments and think, okay, well, that sounds interesting, I'll go and survey my customer base and find out if they work. The problem is if, if you ask people directly, do these biases affect you? Most of the time people will deny it, because what people say influences and what actually influences them. They're completely different things. There's a brilliant psychologist called timothy wilson who has this phrase strangers to ourselves, and his argument is people do not have full introspective insight into their own motivations. So if you put someone on the spot and say to them why did you buy that lager in the pub last night, or why did you buy that particular t-shirt, they will give you all sorts of answers, but most of them will be what timothy wills, of course, for confabulations. The respondent isn't lying. They're not trying to mislead you, but they do mislead you because they don't know what motivated them, so they just give speculative post-rationalizations. So the biggest thing would be, if any of these principles interest you, don't directly ask your customer if they'd be influenced. Put it to a test now. We've been using this language of ab testing, but I would say the the kind of twist on it is it's not ab testing in the normal digital marketing sense of the word. It's not, you know, run, get your final bit of copy and then run at two variants. I mean that that is useful, but you can take this principle all the way through to research. So you know, we talked about the pennies a day effect earlier, that idea that pound a day sounds better than 365 pounds a year.

Richard Shotton: 47:19

If you showed people two products side by side and said which of these two prices would you prefer in that pound versus 365, people would get angry. They'd say look, it's exactly the same thing. That wouldn't affect me. Don't be silly. You know why are you treating me like a fool.

Richard Shotton: 47:34

But if you use this principle of monadic testing, you've got the same sample of people. You randomize them into two groups. You show one a description of the product and say it costs a pound a day. One a description of the product and say it costs 365, six, five a day. So yeah, you would uh that way, when people are just looking at one example, they think they're comparing the price to the product description. But of course, actually, from our bird's eye view as researchers, we are comparing, uh how this description of the price affects people. If you go for that oblique, uh monadic testing approach, then you would start to see a very big effect. So absolutely biggest problem is a reliance on clave data. If you listen directly and uncritically to what people send folks, groups or surveys, you're going to end up doing almost the opposite of what you should do, I would argue so qualitative data is, for behavioral science, not as as important as quantitative.

Chris Norton: 48:26

By the sounds of it.

Richard Shotton: 48:30

So I suppose a qualitative could be. You know what are the kind of softer aspects of a product. Do you think it's? I don't know. You describe what that product, how that product makes. You feel that could still be run in a behavioural science experiment way. But again.

Richard Shotton: 48:50

But again you go back to, let's say you're testing a new drink. You ask people to describe how it tastes and feels. That would be qualitative data, descriptive rather than numeric. You could test that in a behavioral science way by again randomizing people into two groups and just changing one fact in the description of the drink. Maybe some people you say, okay, this um new sparkling wine, it costs 100 pounds a bottle. Other people you tell them it costs five pounds a bottle. What you would find is those qualitative ratings wildly vary between groups. We tend to use price as a badge of quality. There's lots of bamba shifts that studies that show this. So the people that hear the expensive tale, they will give you adjectives like oh, it's deep taste, rich and fruity or whatever. The other people would tell you it tastes like dishwater. It's still qualitative. But the key underlying part is not asking people directly. It's that sense of a little bit of subterfuge, a little bit of a bleakness.

Chris Norton: 49:51

To get to the truth, You've just reminded me of another bit that I found really interesting, which is prices make feels like quality, but also the fact of when you're in like a Five Guys or you're in a restaurant and you can see the chef preparing your food, you can see the work that, like I explained before we started this podcast, I can see all the writing on the, on the, on literally the writing on the wall behind you that you've put a lot of effort into your new book and and when you see the perceived amount of work that's gone into something so I see somebody preparing my meal is your example. I think you see somebody preparing your meal, you instantly think, oh, they've you. That chef's spent a lot of time preparing my meal. That tastes nicer than if you can't see the kitchen, which is why so many kitchens are now open. Golden ramsay absolutely so.

Richard Shotton: 50:43

Psychologists call this the labor illusion. They sometimes call it the illusion of effort. So the clearest study was done by andrea morales, university of southern california, I think in 2005, and what she does is recruit a group of people who are all in market for a house and she shows those people 10 houses that meet their requirements. Now some people are told the estate agent went to loads of effort. It took them nine hours to generate the list and they did it manually. Other people are told this state agent went to low effort. They didn't know how we're using a computer to generate list.

Richard Shotton: 51:19

Morales then asks everyone to rate the quality of the estate agent service and what she finds is that the low effort group break the estate agent at 50 out of 100. The high effort group rate the estate agent at 50 out of 100. The high effort group rate the estate agent at 68 out of 100. So you've got this 36% variance in quality ratings. Now remember everyone is seeing exactly the same product. All that's changing is the description of the amount of effort that went into the product. Morales' argument is we use effort as a proxy for quality. You know the more effort we think people have put into the dish in a restaurant or the service in a state agency, the higher we rate the same product. So, absolutely, you want to be doing everything you can as a service provider to remind people of the efforts that have gone on behind the scenes which is could be like dyson 5127 prototypes.

Richard Shotton: 52:13

It could be actually making the chef's effort more transparent. It could be on your e-commerce site. Um, when you know your site, comparison like compare the market, slowing down the service and telling people what you're doing as they're waiting these are all different ways of applying that underlying principle 57 variants of Heinz, which I remember as well Fascinating.

Chris Norton: 52:38

I've got a question here before we wrap up, which is I think it's quite interesting about the data and the qualitative stuff you've said. In your career, has there been a moment when data told one story but your gut, or a client's gut, told you another, and how do you reconcile the two?

Richard Shotton: 52:59

Oh, very good question, not that I can spring to mind. It feels like something that has happened. I can't think of an example off the top of my head. I think if you ever get that situation, it's worth thinking are there any biases in the data collection? Because you can often get like we're talking about with the pen is a day effect People. If you've put them on the spot, they can give you very logical, rational explanations. So I think sometimes if there feels like there is a immediate disconnect between your gut feeling and the data you're getting in, the first thing I would do is really analyze how that data was collected. Are there any um problems with the data collection? You know is? Is the data reliant on people having full insight into the motivations? Um, was the sample representative? I think I'd go through an awful lot of those questions. First of all, and only if you know you were super, uh impressed by the experimental setup would then I think, well, let's ignore that gut feel um, what, what do you do in your day job now, then?

Chris Norton: 54:20

so you write books, obviously, and you've got your own. You've got your own consultancy business. What, what do you do for clients, and how can they find people find you after they've listened to this a mate, they've read one of your books, they've heard you on the podcast. How can they find you? And what, what can you do for them?

Richard Shotton: 54:35

so I work in a real niche of marketing, which is this overlap between behavioral science and marketing, so that everything I do will always be through that lens. But then, in terms of the questions I help clients with, it can be things like how do we improve the conversion rate on website? How do we get people to remember our creative messaging? How do we display our prices? How do we get people to trust us?

Richard Shotton: 55:00

It can be any multi-question in that absolutely broadest sense, and I always think, well, what are the experiments out there that shine a light on this, this problem? What tends to do is come back with a little report of like here are eight or ten themes from behavioral science experiments, here's the evidence that proves those insights robust, and then some arguments what you can practically do differently to to apply those. So, yeah, people can reach out to me on linkedin probably the best place or on x and twitter at our shot. And yeah, always happy to help with um. You know pretty much any brief, as long as it's a behavioral science angle that people would find useful yeah, brilliant I mean that was really enjoyable.

Chris Norton: 55:42

Yeah, it's great, and the subliminal, the subliminal message in the background about your new book, which has been there the whole time.

Richard Shotton: 55:47

I now want to read that one. Yeah, so final question, and obviously thank you for taking part in the show. If we could interview um anybody next on our podcast, who would you recommend?

Richard Shotton: 55:58

oh, what a great question. So I think for me, the person I'd always dial in to listen to is rory sutherland. So his field of interest overlaps behavioral science and how you apply it to marketing. But he's got such a fertile imagination uh, comes with the you know wonderfully creative ideas about how to apply the same principle.

Richard Shotton: 56:20

So that's that's a, I think, a brilliant question, but I think he's someone I'd always want to listen to and the beauty of interviewing rory is we have to ask one question and then he just goes on for an hour, doesn't he?

Richard Shotton: 56:31

he'll argue with himself, he'll be talking about HS2 German porn stores. I mean Jaguar Aristotle it'll be, you know, the most eclectic we definitely need to get him on the show so, richard, thank you very much.

Chris Norton: 56:45

That was absolutely fascinating yeah, thanks for coming on the show, richard, that was great.